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The magazine of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science

The Link is the magazine of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.

Its name recognizes the pioneering work of two of the School of Computer Science's co-founders, Allen Newell and Herb Simon, who invented the use of linked-list data structures for representing complex information.

But it also serves as the link between the School of Computer Science and more than 10,000 alumni, colleagues, parents and other friends around the world.

SCS Dean Andrew Moore asked me to evaluate the effectiveness of The Link as an outreach tool to our parents, alumni and other friends, so earlier this year, I sent surveys to 500 people randomly selected from our U.S. mailing list. The questions were adapted from a model survey supplied by the non-profit Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Five people who returned the surveys were then randomly selected to receive Visa gift cards for $50, $25 or $10. We received 112 responses, for a 22 percent return rate. Here’s what we learned.

Our annual summer SCS/ECE alumni events continue to be a favorite for our graduates and their families. This summer we held gatherings at Boston’s Museum of Science, San Francisco’s Computer History Museum, the Washington, D.C. offices of Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox, and at sea, on a boat cruising Seattle’s Puget Sound.

This issue includes a history of CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, along with updates on Astrobotic, autonomous helicopter technology, the first classroom uses of IBM's Watson technology, and four innovations from SCS that have been named to Popular Science's "Best of What's New." Plus, there's Research Notebook, SCS News in Brief, alumni profiles and snapshots, and more.
Download the Winter 2015 issue of The Link, the magazine of CMU's School of Computer Science. (PDF reader required.)

If you’re one of the millions of people who have enjoyed Disney’s newest animated feature, “Big Hero 6,” you also learned a little something about soft robotics.And it isn’t just fantasy—the creators of the inflatable robot Baymax, a pivotal character in the movie, were inspired by work they saw while visiting CMU’s Robotics Institute several years ago.